Creepastic Moments in Superheroism!: Hal Jordan

[espanolbot]

The audience's attitudes towards certain subjects change as time progresses, so what might seem harmless or even amusing to a past audience comes across as offensive or even creepy by one of today! So, I thought that I'd gather up a few for your perusal.*

*Note: This isn't meant to make light of what they're doing or who they're doing it to, but rather pointing out how unpleasant and strange it is that SUPERHEROES are the ones doing it.

Item One: Hal Jordan, Inappropriate behaviour around a minor.

Starting with one from the olden days, we begin with a tale of one Hal Jordan and young Green Lantern Arisa Rrab, where the then 14 year old Arisa was treated as a surrogate sister to the Green Lantern Corps of the time.


Somehow Arisa got a crush on the kind of doofy Jordan, and somehow managed to will herself to age by some ten or so years. Reasoning that she now at least looks like an adult, Hal promptly sleeps with her.


This was later retconned to Arisa's species aging at a different rate to that of humans, with her being chronologically much older than Hal to work their way around the whole interstellar conscent issue thing... Which doesn't really change the fact that she'd still mentally be the same age she was just prior to accelerating her aging, so effectively Hal (and by extention DC) seemed to be making the "Hey, she LOOKED legal!" excuse. Ew.


Basically? If THIS ends up being a conversation that one of your main superheroes is having, you've probably gone down a path of storytelling best avoided in a mainstream comicbook.


Generally though, Hal's relationship with women in the past hasn't been that great. Whether it's a character quirk or just a reflection of the times the story was written in can be up for debate, however. Things like his casual sexism and racism, for example.




In the years prior to the DC Reboot several years back, however, a lot of these more... questionable attributes of Jordan's character were carefullly removed to make him a bit more palatable (and promptly brought back for his New 52 JLA issues). This was mostly done by transferring the unpleasant sexual stuff onto Jordan's BFF Oliver Queen (who I'll cover in the next segment), but they still had a reference to it in the series Cry for Justice, with Ollie referencing Hal apparently having a drunken threesome with two members of the Birds of Prey.


This last one so angered the actual Birds of Prey creators at the time, and they had to retcon it in such a way that it seemed like Hal or Black Canary spreading rumours about Helena and Zinda behind their backs.


And we close with Guy Gardner, a character that somehow went from being a guy who worked with kids with special needs to the "asshole Green Lantern". Just how much this was the case varies from writer to writer, but in one of the Superbuddies series (a comedy series featuring some of the cast from Justice League International which is so AWKWARD now for so many reasons... as a series involving Maxwell Lord getting mad at Blue Beetle's antics while people joke about Sue Dibny being pregnant could get post-Identity Crisis).

The writer of the series, Keith Giffen, allegedly wanted Mary Marvel (who was between 14 and 16 at the time of this story) to sleep with Guy during the course of the story, causing her to shift from her virginal white costume to her traditional red one. 'Cause SYMBOLISM. Whether this was true or not depends on who you ask, but it's pretty much an example of the kind of creepy stuff going on behind the scenes at DC for a good while in regards to Mary Marvel that Grant Morrison was satirising in Final Crisis.

Guy didn't get to sleep with Mary (thank god), but he still did this, which seems almost as bad.


'Cause a grown man groping a minor and sniffing his fingers afterwards is hilarious, right? Urgh.

Comments

[icon_uk]

So are Damian Wayne, Billy Batson and Bart Allen, and I don't want to see them in sexual situations either.

[bruinsfan]

I actually thought Billy becoming involved with (age-appropriate) Courtney Whitmore and the old guard of the JSA going to Defcon One over what they thought was a grown man behaving inappropriately toward a teenager was an interesting story. That version of the JSA got retconned out of existence before any of the adults found out about Captain Marvel's juvenile alter ego, didn't it?

[espanolbot]

I think that the core JLA people knew (Batman and Superman definitely did), so Jay Garrick and the like not knowing is a touch silly. I know it was the case (and the relationship came to an end due to a combination of Jakeem Thunder being jealous and ratting on them and Geoff Johns wanting a Kitty Pryde/Colossus style relationship between Court and Atom Smasher).

[jaybee3]

The whole JSA found out Billy's age in the last guest appearance of the Marvels in JSA (or pretty much in the old DCU for that matter) written by Geoff Johns and Jerry Ordway. This was the arc that brought back Black Adam, Isis and...Black Mary Marvel (dressed in the Final Crisis costume!) along with the Wizard Shazam coming back to life and depowering everyone (and that's how it ended). The JSA (minus Courtney) was shocked momentarily that Captain Marvel was only a kid. But then it was never mentioned again (so no apologies coming Billy's way) and in the very next issue or so with the Marvel Family gone, Courtney was back to crushing on adult Atom Smasher (which was inappropriate but apparently OK for some reason because Geoff Johns said so).

[jekylls_salvation]

Aren't Damien and Billy like 10 and 12 (or is Billy more like 14)? Girls tend to mature a couple years faster than boys in adolescence, at least physically (unfortunate adaptation at a crucial period for humanity I'm afraid)-- but recent evidence indicates the parts of the brain responsible for gauging consequence aren't actually done developing until the age of 25. So one could argue that would be pretty messed up even if you tacked on a few years.